Without waiting for the end of World War II, the new leadership of France announced their requirements for promising military equipment. In March 1945, de Gaulle's government ordered work to begin on a new tank. Initially, it was supposed to design and put into production medium tanks at the level of the best samples of the Second World War. Subsequently, the appearance of armored vehicles will change and several versions of the tank will appear at once. Nevertheless, all variants of the project took place under the same general designation - AMX 50.
The first was the M4 medium tank. This tank was supposed to be equipped with a 90-millimeter cannon and provide armor at the level of the American "Sherman" or the Soviet T-34. When developing the M4 tank, information was used from the study of captured German armored vehicles. Therefore, all subsequent vehicles of the AMX 50 family will bear the "imprint" of the German tank building. In particular, the chassis of all these tanks had road wheels placed according to a modified Knipkamp scheme: they were placed not in four rows, but in two. Two prototypes of the M4 were built, and later, several tanks with more powerful weapons were created on its basis.
In 1949, based on the results of testing a tank with a 90 mm gun, it was decided that the French army needed something more powerful. At this time, two projects of new armored vehicles were launched, armed with a 120-mm cannon. As a result of the first, prototypes of a tank with a swinging turret were created, while the second meant the creation of a full-fledged self-propelled artillery installation. It should be noted that one of the reasons for the creation of the ACS was the risk of a military clash with the Armed Forces of the USSR. After the war, the Soviet Union had a huge number of tanks and self-propelled guns, including heavy ones. The AMX 50, with its 90mm cannon, could not fight the IS-3 or ISU-152. Therefore, it was necessary to make some kind of armored vehicle, capable, at least, of withstanding the heavy vehicles of a potential enemy.
The AMX 50 Foch self-propelled gun, named after the French commander of the First World War Ferdinand Foch, was based on the chassis of the AMX 50 M4 tank. The hull of the original tank was significantly redesigned. Due to the peculiarities of the layout of such a class of equipment as the self-propelled guns, instead of the tower, a volumetric armored wheelhouse was installed. Separately, it is worth noting the fact that the "Foch" felling began in the front of the vehicle and ended only in the stern. For comparison, on Soviet self-propelled guns, the wheelhouse always ended in front of the engine compartment, and the hull had a characteristic ledge in this place. On Foch, in turn, although there was a similar ledge, it was much smaller. The deckhouse, as well as the rest of the hull, was assembled on bolts and welded from flat plates. The thickness of the armor parts reached 180 mm (upper frontal plate). The lower sheet of the frontal part was much thinner - 100 millimeters. However, these "differences" in thickness were considered optimal in terms of the ratio of protection to weight. Also of some interest is the angle of inclination of the upper frontal plate. The 180 mm panel was mounted at an angle of 35 ° to the horizontal. The combination of thickness and angle was not an absolute panacea, but compared to the original AMX-50, the new self-propelled gun was much stronger and more protected. It is noteworthy that the AMX 50 Foch self-propelled gun rather strongly resembled the German Jagdpanther self-propelled gun. Obviously, this was the very "German experience" obtained from the study of trophies.
The estimated combat weight of the Foch self-propelled gun was 50 tons. An armored vehicle of fifty tons was supposed to be driven by a Maybach HL 295 12VC 12-cylinder gasoline engine with a capacity of 850 horsepower. As you can see, the French borrowed from the former enemy not only the groundwork for armor, but also the power plant. With a specific power of about 15-17 hp. per ton, the self-propelled gun could move along the highway at speeds up to 50 km / h.
The basis of the Foch's armament, designed to destroy enemy heavy tanks, was the 120-mm cannon. The long-barreled gun was equipped with a muzzle brake and advanced recoil devices. To maintain good ergonomics of the fighting compartment, the AMX designers had to move the gun forward. Because of this, some of the recoil devices ended up outside the armored corps. For this reason, it was necessary to make an original armor mask of a complex shape, consisting of two parts. One of them was fixedly mounted on the frontal sheet of the hull, and the second was mounted on the barrel and could move. Due to the fact that the axes on which the gun turned were outside the internal volume of the self-propelled gun, it turned out to provide the possibility of pointing guns with a relatively large breech within acceptable limits. The gun could move horizontally in sectors of 9 ° in both directions, and the vertical aiming angle varied from -6 ° to + 16 °. In the packing of the fighting compartment, up to 40 unitary shells of any type could fit. The layout of the armored hull made it possible in the future to add another block of trays for 10-15 shots.
Additional self-propelled armament consisted of 7, 5 mm Reibel machine guns. The first of them was located in a special turret above the loader's workplace. The design of the turret made it possible to fire in a sector with a width of 180 ° horizontally and carry out vertical guidance within 12 degrees up and down from the horizontal. The decision to place a machine gun above the loader's workplace raises questions. Of course, an armored vehicle must have weapons for defense against enemy manpower, but why the machine gun was not given over to, for example, the commander? Naturally, the machine gun located on the roof of the ACS had a number of non-projectile zones. Therefore, in addition to the loader's turret, in some drawings of the AMX 50 Foch self-propelled gun, there is a small turret with two machine guns in the stern. From the same drawings, it follows that the stern machine gunner could raise and lower the barrels of his weapons in the range from -6 ° to + 70 °. Thus, the stern turret served as anti-aircraft weapons. Apparently, the aft shooter was supposed to provide cover for the flanks and rear of the self-propelled gun. However, none of the available photographs of Foch's prototypes show such a turret. It turns out that either they did not have time to finish it before the start of the tests, or over time they abandoned it. The total ammunition load of all three machine guns was 2750 rounds. 600 of them relied on the loader's machine gun.
The Foch crew consisted of four to five people. The driver was located in front of the self-propelled gun, to the right of the gun. Behind him was the loader's workplace. To the left of the cannon, in front of the ACS, the gunner's seat was mounted, who had at his disposal a sight for direct fire, a mechanical guidance system and an electric fire control system. The commander was located behind the gunner's workplace, whose duties included maintaining communications, searching for targets and general coordination of the crew's actions. The commander was not entitled to a sight - for observing the situation and searching for targets, he had a small turret equipped with a stereo tube-rangefinder. In view of the high power of the gun, as well as the requirements for the survivability of the equipment, the optics of the stereo tube was installed in a characteristic armored casing of a cylindrical shape. Finally, the fifth crew member in early versions of the project was housed in a machine-gun turret in the rear of the ACS. On prototypes Foch, the stern tower, and with it the gunner, was absent. The crew was embarked and disembarked from the vehicle through a hatch in the middle of the hull roof. It was located above the front of the engine compartment. As for the aft shooter, he, being located separately from the rest of the crew, had to get into the turret and leave it either through a hatch in the upper part, or through a special hole above the engine. When landing / disembarking through this hole, the shooter first entered the fighting compartment, after which he could get out through the same hatch as the rest of the crew.
In 1951, two prototypes of the AMX 50 Foch were built. Trial firing confirmed the effectiveness of firing from a 120-mm cannon at the vast majority of targets that existed at that time. The previously finished chassis also did not cause any complaints. After a short stay at the test site, both self-propelled guns were sent for trial operation in the army. However, "Foch" was not adopted for service. At a time when the French military leadership was deciding on the deployment of mass production, several opinions arose at the same time, which seriously influenced the future of all French armored vehicles. Firstly, a number of military leaders began to doubt the advisability of adopting such a self-propelled gun. It was widely believed that the troops needed tanks more than self-propelled artillery mounts, even if with such firepower. Secondly, the active development of the NATO alliance entailed the need for standardization and unification of weapons. As a result of numerous disputes and meetings, the Foch project was first closed. Later, the same thing happened with other armored vehicles developed under the AMX 50 program. The last of them was the version with a swinging tower and a 120-mm cannon. In total, six prototypes of tanks and self-propelled guns were manufactured during the AMX 50 program by the mid-50s.
This is what the AMX 50 Foch will look like in World of Tanks
